You Are December
by Juliedoo
Summary: Sitting here in a lonely room, waiting for winter. The love that never was.


-oOo-

Winter crept in through her bedroom window.

He was small and short, a sharp faced child swimming in his old fashioned clothes. Chapped lips, colorless hair the same frigid shade and stinging texture of frost, coke bottle green eyes framed by a thicket of snow slick lashes. There was a sword strapped to his back, the blade almost as long as he was tall, the hilt leaning tiredly against his shoulder.

He was a sudden chill, a bitter wind slinking in with the dry autumn leaves, a notch up on the thermostat.

Karin was the only one that could see him.

She gave him a vague smile behind the rim of her coffee cup, absently swallowing the last slurp of lukewarm tar and thumping the mug down on her bedside table. "Hey, Toshiro. Long time no see." The words were a burr in her throat, and her voice snagged on them, tearing.

This winter didn't come once a year. He wasn't as punctual as December. The last time he'd visited, she'd been twenty seven.

She was thirty now.

He hadn't changed. (Of course he hadn't.) His hair was a little longer, a little more disordered, his eyes duller, a lot more _I am going to live to see you die_. The eyes of a man smothered in a boy's body, shoveling dirt in graveyards and nicking off souls. Not dates on his calender, just deaths. Those eyes flicked around the messy room, taking in the absence of the picture frames on her cluttered nightstand, the vanished cologne, her naked finger.

He stepped silently off the sill into the room, soundless as the ghost of a church mouse. Ignoring her blasé greeting, the hollow flatness of her mannequin voice, he asked, "Where's the husband?"

He'd never referred to Yasuo by name, not once.

She'd never asked him why. Karin wasn't the type to pick at scabs, especially if they were still oozing.

"Hell if I know," she sighed, looking at her toes because she couldn't bring herself to look at him. Her red nail polish seemed incredibly garish all of a sudden. Whore scarlet. "We divorced two years ago."

A careful, brittle silence crawled between them.

She could hear her pulse clattering in her ears, her heart burping excitedly. She hated that. Hated how that tightly bundled ball of feelings in her chest always came wagging back to him like a stupidly happy dog no matter how many times he kicked her away.

Her head was as heavy as a boulder, drooping on her neck. She forced it up, stapled her stare to his. He was standing at the end of her bed, young enough to be her child, old enough to be her grandfather many times over. Expressionless and taut, a rubberband stretched to the point of snapping, but he never broke. She knew that face (loved that face, loathed it a little too) but she couldn't tell what he was thinking. The blinds had been drawn, the shutters snapped closed, his door shut and locked to her forever.

So why was he _here_, poking a dead horse with a sharp stick?

She was so tired. She felt like a sluggish little creek in the middle of a drought that had finally bled dry. She was sick of missing him when he was gone and tip toeing around him when he was here. Frustrated with the careful waltz they danced, of the four left feet that had them stumbling in to each other, moving together but never in sync.

He'd never been her lover. He was a man, and yet he wasn't. Ancient but painfully young, and dead, too. So she'd given her body to a string of faceless men, thinking _maybe_, but her soul and everything in her had groveled towards this not-really-a-boy.

No wonder her marriage had crumbled like an old, stale muffin. Sorry, Yasuo, I'll marry you and fuck you and live with you, but I'll never love you, because my heart isn't mine to give away.

"Why are you here?"

Toshiro blinked at her. She watched him cut the head off a sigh, look away, back out the window and up at the swollen, overcast sky. Gray and purple and puffy, like a livid bruise. A strangled morning, when night was still wrestling with dawn.

"Because I'm just as stupid as you are," he finally answered.

A bitter smile knifed across her lips. "Will you still be as stupid when I'm a wrinkly old woman?"

He flinched. His body jerked, a movement that was muffled and tamped down in less than a second, but she was watching him so hungrily she saw it. And she felt like a bitch.

The warmth was sucked out of the room. Goosebumps pimpled along her white skin, potholes in the highway of blue veins. Her breath clouded and curled out into the angry air.

"I've always been an idiot about you," he told her insipidly. His voice was like a spiderweb of ice splintering along the floor. His head was still turned away. "It's why I didn't leave you alone like I should have, when you were still a little girl. It's why I'm still here, after all these years. It's why I don't think I'll ever be able to walk away from you completely, even though I'm poisoning your life."

Her hands fisted in her sweat pants. A chuckle bubbled out of her, scraping against her teeth. "It's not your fault I love you, Toshiro," she snorted, screwing her eyes shut because if she kept them open they might start leaking, and wouldn't that be embarrassing.

Quiet. And then she felt his fingertips fluttering softly over her the curve of her cheekbone, feathering up into her hair, his touch fleeting and weightless and papery, like a brush of butterfly wings. "You should forget me," he rasped. Her eyes clenched tighter at the rusted grief in the short, sharp words. "Stop clinging to a pipe dream, Karin." His fingers fisted in her hair, let go. "I can't love you like you want. Like I want. Not as I am, not as you are. It will never happen. Don't wait for it. Don't _do _this...just sitting here in a lonely room. You deserve a family, children. I can't give you that, Karin."

Something wet spilled through her lashes.

"If we'd been normal. If we'd..." she struggled, inhaled a trembling breath. "What would it have been like?"

She heard a swish of fabric moving away from her, back towards the window. "Wishes and what ifs are pointless." A merciless truth. "If I'd been human I would have never met you, because I would have died a long time ago. Some things just aren't meant to be."

When she opened her eyes again he was gone.

The room was still cold.

* * *

**AN: **You should listen to "Breathe Me" by Sia. It's a good song, and was my background music while writing this. Really fits the atmosphere, I think. Hope you liked this. n_n


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